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Comment by chm | Hacker News Reader

I'm quite surprised the RPi team hasn't created a new model in two years. Sure they just released a new "compute module", but that's not destined to the same crowd. I'd like to see an RPi revision C.

Other than that, do any of you know of a chip I could buy to program from scratch? I'd be interested to learn a very simple processor but I have no idea where to start. I heard M68Ks are nice.

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They intentionally haven't released a new model, and don't plan to do so any time soon. They want to have a stable hardware platform, and spend time optimizing the software so it can benefit all the RPi owners, instead of continuously releasing new models and fragmenting the community.

So basically rpi was LTS from start.

You can't go wrong with an Arduino. You can use the Arduino IDE to get up to speed very quickly, and then later program it with avr-gcc and get rid of the Arduino bootloader/libraries if you desire.

The next logical progression IMHO after Arduino/AVR chips is bare metal ARM development. Check out chips like the NXP LPC series which can be programmed with a free GCC toolchain, and more importably support on chip debugging with OpenOCD. Good getting started guide here: https://learn.adafruit.com/getting-started-with-the-lpc810/i...

M68K is dated. It's still used in some applications, but it's basically a dead end. ARM is where it's at these days.

There's tons of ARM development hardware out there, but two cheap, awesome development boards I'd recommend might include:

* The TI Tiva LaunchPad - http://www.ti.com/tool/ek-tm4c123gxl

* The STM32F4 Discovery - http://www.st.com/web/catalog/tools/FM116/SC959/SS1532/PF252...

Or, if you want to get adventurous, there's tons of ultra-cheap ARM development boards on eBay. You'll usually need to get your own JTAG adapter to work with them, and figuring out how to drive some of the peripherals may be a bit of an adventure, but the prices are unbeatable. (I paid about $40 for a "HY-STM32" board with a 3.2" touchscreen, for instance.)

I'd be interested to learn a very simple processor

Look at Atmel ATTiny and Microchip PIC10/PIC12 series.

What about one of the MSP430s?

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